promote ascii functions to elemental

[jalvesz]

Promote ascii functions from pure to elemental for potentially better optimization and ease use for array expressions manipulation.

[perazz]

I believe I remember that some older versions of gfortran had issues with elemental functions and character . However, that seems not an issue here as all tests pass with all supported gfortran versions. LGTM, thank you @jalvesz

[jalvesz]

Do you remember if it was a compile-time problem or a run-time problem? maybe it would be better to add array-like tests also ? I don't recall running into such problems.

[perazz]

I can't find a link right now in my bugzilla - I suggest we wait for another while, and if no further comments arise, this PR can be merged imho.

[jvdp1]

Thank you @perazz . I guess that the specs should be updated too.
Re: the history, I don't remember any specific reasons why they were not defined as elemental. These procedures were some of the first to be implemented in stdlib and the structure was not well defined yet (see e.g., #32 ).

[perazz]

@jvdp1 @jalvesz I believe this is ready to merge. Should we wait another 1/2 days, then merge?

[jalvesz]

On my side I think it could be merged. The fails in the macOS CI are due to an update in github, which can be fixed in another PR.

The macOS-12 environment is deprecated, consider switching to macOS-13, macOS-14 (macos-latest) or macOS-15. For more details, see https://github.com/actions/runner-images/issues/10721

[perazz]

Merging now.